Photo Credit—Argosy Bookstore, New York City The Argosy Book Store on 59th Street in New York reeled me in, not with a siren call but with the only book title that would have drawn me like iron filings to a magnet—Hyman Kaplan by Leonard Q. Ross, exhibited in its...

Calgary was booming with oil. On my arrival, I bumped into fellow immigrant accountants all in their mid-twenties—all Ismaili Muslims educated in England like me. In the evenings they disappeared to pray at their mosque. “Why don’t you join us. After all, you’re one...

Recently, we convened a team meeting to launch my next book. “I would like to publish my collected analects (blog posts). Each would be headed by a coloured photo.” Ida immediately piped up with “You can’t do that. It’s too expensive to use colour. It runs contrary to...

My first assignment in London, as an accountant, was the audit of Regions Beyond Missionary Union. The Methodist Centre comprised a large, marbled mausoleum of a building. There, I was introduced to Janice, the head accountant. She seemed to have stepped out of an...

As we roll into 2025, those extrapolating the past year—Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine, a new US president, countless deaths through forced migrations—may wonder if Hope exists. A 99-year-old war veteran, painfully pushing his walker round and round his garden every day to...

Saturday was laundry day in Larnaka. By nine in the morning, the sun shone benignly upon me as I carried a hold-all filled with my week’s dirty clothes. Anna, a five-foot-nothing scrawny blond from Poland, in her thirties, oversaw the laundry room at the Petrou...

Weeks before Christmas, the Aslett women would gather at Flo’s—my foster mother, the grand matriarch of the clan—to make pasties, fruit cakes and mince pies. Coins from the past—copper farthings , ha’pennies, silver shillings, sixpences, and half-crowns—were stirred...

"Felix, can you walk me through Stone Town today? It's been 30 years since my last visit." Felix was my go-to guide in Zanzibar. We crossed the square in front of my hotel Serena to enter a warren of runaway, intertwining, meandering streets. I had expected to find...

Coming home last week from a six o’clock breakfast meeting, I noticed our neighbours’ lighted window. The curtains were undrawn, two boys—7 and 8—were scampering hither and thither, their mother running in opposite directions. We also had two boys. Now adults. I can...

“Pops, why are we waiting here?” Chris asked. Our family of four had been stuck in a minibus, built to accommodate 20, for an hour in the parking lot of Hilo Airport. The boys had been woken up at 6 a.m. for all of us to be collected at 7 a.m. for a tour of the...